During his acceptance speech, a freshly re-elected President Obama spoke of a message that he received from the American people, a message to “focus on your jobs” and to tackle the challenge of “freeing ourselves from foreign oil”.

With that in mind, there is one project in the international spotlight that would quickly and easily address both of those issues – approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

And now, our Canadian allies are urging the White House to stop playing politics, stop sending mixed signals, stop stalling, and approve the project that would not only benefit our neighbors to the north, but the United States economy itself.

For the past year, the Obama administration played politics with the Keystone project in an attempt to placate the far-left environmental contingency in the Democrat party, creating confusion about the future of the pipeline and leaving Canada to wonder if their support and friendship were being taken for granted.

Peter McKenna, chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Prince Edward Island stated, “It made sense for Obama to put that (Keystone) on the back burner to deal with the environmental constituency of the Democratic Party”.

He added however, that issues affecting Canada need to be addressed now that the election is over, citing the Keystone XL Pipeline as “the most important issue”.

While the President’s initial decision to reject the pipeline was blatantly political in nature, it came at a cost to the American people, delaying real job creation and energy progress. Now however, approving construction should be a no-brainer.

Last January, President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada Corp.’s proposal to build a pipeline carrying Canadian bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to refineries in the United States, including some in Texas on the Gulf of Mexico coast. The rejection was a calculated election-year move aimed at appeasing Mr. Obama’s supporters in the powerful environmental movement. With his re-election, the President should now move quickly to approve the Keystone XL pipeline on its merits alone.

While Peter McKenna sees approval of the pipeline happening in the next six to twelve months, and with Moody’s also predicting approval, Stephen Ewart, Editor of the Calgary Herald’s Energy and Economics section isn’t quite as optimistic.

Ewart counters that approval of the pipeline is anything but a ‘no-brainer’, citing scheduled protests over the pipeline that will apply pressure to the White House, as well as looming concerns from environmental activists over the effects of climate change, concerns freshly renewed by the impact of Hurricane Sandy.

Ewart adds that despite the election results seemingly freeing the President to make the right decision on the pipeline, concern for his legacy means politics will continue to play a role in that decision.

He writes, “Obama has provided little insight into his views on Keystone XL, but it seems unlikely politics will not play a role in the decision that will impact his presidential legacy.”

Uncertainty north of the border has been amplified by the administration’s silence thus far on the project. Rather than following his campaign slogan by moving ‘forward’ with the project, President Obama has remained non-committal.

“… Obama, who earlier this year rejected TransCanada Corp.’s initial application because it needed more environmental review, has remained noncommittal about the fate of the line”.

Uncertainty for our Canadian allies creates another major concern for the U.S. – the threat of oil and economic resources being exported to China.

The Globe and Mail editorial cites this possibility:

“The pipeline has even been touted as the best way for Canadian producers to export crude to China, by putting it on ships once it arrives in the Gulf.”

Most importantly, the same editorial spells out in simple terms why the Keystone XL Pipeline should easily garner approval. Aside from the many economic and energy benefits, the project has worked around areas that were of greatest concern to the environmental obstructionists.

The “merits are many, and they serve both Canada and the United States. TransCanada Corp. has proposed a new route that avoids environmentally sensitive areas in Nebraska and reduces potential impact on the vital Ogallala aquifer. The pipeline’s construction will create jobs, secure a hungry market for the heavier crude from the oil sands, decrease North American dependency on overseas oil, and help lower the price of gas in the United States.”

Will the Obama administration follow through on their promise to focus on jobs and free the United States from the constraints of foreign oil? Perhaps of equal import, will they make a decision before these valuable resources end up benefitting other foreign countries such as China?

The economic benefits to our nation and our neighbors to the north are far too numerous to allow this opportunity to slip away.

A group known as the Tar Sands Blockade has come up with a brilliant idea that is sure to rock the environmental and energy debate – chaining themselves to equipment in an attempt to halt work on the job-creating Keystone Pipeline.

“Today’s action has halted work on a segment of TransCanada’s illegitimate pipeline outside of Saltillo, TX. As promised, Tar Sands Blockade’s rolling campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience pushes forward. Five blockaders total are currently risking arrest to stop work on this segment of the Keystone XL pipeline. Contractors discovered their presence early in the work day, and work at the site was called off shortly thereafter.”

Uh oh…

One protester in a local news story (video below) explains why it’s so important for this group to stop construction of the pipeline.

The pipeline you say, infringes upon your Constitutional rights? Well no actually, no it doesn’t.

But the genius doesn’t end there … the group of protesters chained themselves to equipment that wasn’t even being used.

Money quote from the news story:

“TransCanada says the protesters chained themselves to a third-party contractor’s equipment that was not going to be used today.”

Brilliant!

The group is so committed to the cause that they’ve decided to work all the way up until lunch time.

“It’s after lunch now, so we’re gonna follow the lead of our contractor and police friends and call it a day!

Dedication baby!

Of course, pay no mind to the concessions TransCanada has already made in supporting a new pipeline route in Nebraska, one that would shield sensitive areas from construction.

“Today TransCanada announced the selection of a revised route for the Keystone XL Pipeline which bypasses the sensitive Sandhills region of Nebraska. The new route will result in the project crossing fewer miles of threatened and endangered species habitat, and fewer streams, rivers, and wetlands while completely avoiding sensitive Wellhead Protection Areas where the state’s groundwater resources are particularly shallow. These changes will further increase the resiliency of the Keystone XL pipeline which the U.S. State Department already declared ‘would have a degree of safety greater than any typically constructed domestic oil pipeline system.’”

Second, the report immediately took the heat off of their own argument by saying this:

These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Finally, they start delving into the fact that the assessment can’t even be made on the global level, because weather extremes such as these have been witnessed … locally.

And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.

Thanks for going through all of that to tell me that summer is hot.

You know what else is hot? The second closest planet to the sun – Venus – which experiences blazing surface temperatures due to an atmosphere consisting mostly of carbon dioxide, which causes a greenhouse effect.

How did the carbon dioxide get on an uninhabitable planet? Um, naturally… Not by man surprisingly enough.

But global warming alarmists would have you believe it’s because Venusian businesses don’t have to adhere to the Kyoto Protocol.

Ten years ago, Senate Democrats blocked energy production in a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). At the time, they claimed that ANWR should be off limits because the oil would take 10 years to reach the market. Ten years later, ANWR remains closed, gas prices have skyrocketed, and Democrats continue to block additional energy production.

Radical, nutty, propagandist Professor Kari Norgaard has followed the lead of all the other Liberals who can’t use data and facts to win their argument. Professor Norgaard, from the University of Oregon, says to deny Global Warming junk science is “racism.” But, it’s even more absurd than that. If you reject the junk data, corruption, and blatant grab for power that is the Green Movement she wants you diagnosed with a disease. And treated.

Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be “treated”, according to an Oregon-based professor of “sociology and environmental studies”. Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South.

The Environmental Protection Agency is close to issuing the first limits to cut U.S. greenhouse gases from power plants, with an announcement possible as soon as today, according to people familiar with the matter.

The rules from President Barack Obama’s administration would set emissions for all power plants at the level established for a natural-gas plant, or about half what is released from a coal-burning facility. Any new coal plants would need expensive carbon-capture equipment, according to the people, who declined to be identified before an announcement.

The proposed nationwide standards would be the first by the EPA for carbon-dioxide from power plants, the largest source of those emissions in the U.S. Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club are pressing the Obama administration to issue tight standards to head off an increase in global warming that they warn could be catastrophic.“It will make it nearly impossible to build a new coal plant,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in an interview. “The market has been moving in this direction already” so the rule “captures the end of an era.”

This comes as no surprise to anybody who paid attention to the President’s intentions prior to his election, in which he promised to bankrupt the coal industry.

Obama, January 2008: “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

When Obama talks of having a laser focus on the economy, what he means is having a laser focus on putting ideology above economy.

Earlier this month, Sean Hackbarth reported on the effects that the administration’s extreme environmental agenda is having, with the announcement of more plany closings:

Yesterday, GenOn Energy, the third-largest U.S. independent power producer, announced they were shutting down power plants, because “forecasted returns on investments necessary to comply with environmental regulations are insufficient.” That’s financial-speak for “Regulations make it too costly to keep them running.”

From Bloomberg:

Shutdowns will begin in June at the units, which don’t generate enough profit to cover the costs of complying with the rules, Houston-based GenOn said today in a statement. The plants, located at eight sites in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey, generate 3,140 megawatts in the wholesale market overseen by PJM Interconnection. Except for one unit, all of the plants burn coal, according to GenOn’s website.

Jeff Ostermayer at Shopfloor.org reminds us that “These closings will again result in the loss of jobs and have a negative impact on the local communities. Often we forget about the ripple effect of these regulations and how it can impact a small town and community.”

Maggie over at Thurber’s Thoughts has a fantastic piece on what she originally calls a spin job by the administration. But hearing Jay Carney tell the American people that President Obama did not reject the Keystone pipeline isn’t spin.

It’s, as she concludes, an out-and-out lie.

This is an administration so arrogant that they actually believe they can look directly into the camera and lie to the American people. They are banking on you not knowing any better. And if you’re not offended or outraged no matter your view on the Keystone pipeline project itself, then you have relegated yourself to a life of government servitude, an acceptance of administration lies, a repeat of the epic mistake our country made in 2008 – or your just too damn lazy to care anymore.

I suppose that the job of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is to spin the actions of President Barack Obama in a favorable light. But out and out lies, unchecked by the media, are beyond what Americans should expect – especially with an economic project as critical as the Keystone Oil Pipeline.

White House press secretary Jay Carney first says Republicans “forced” President Obama to deny the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. Later in his press briefing, Carney says Obama didn’t turn down the pipeline.

“In terms of Keystone, as you all know, the history here is pretty clear. And the fact is because Republicans decided to play political with Keystone, their action essentially forced the administration to deny the permit process because they insisted on a time frame in which it was impossible to completely approve the pipeline,” Carney said when asked about the pipeline by ABC News’ Jake Tapper.

As Maggie points out, the pipeline has been under consideration for three years. It isn’t a new project that just snuck up on the President. The deadline imposed by Republicans was something that Obama actually forced, having dragged his feet for so long.

And when Carney whines about not having enough time to review – during that three year span the project was approved by 10 government agencies already, including the environment-bound EPA!